pro_patria_mortuus | (no subject)

Harry snorts. "Ay, 'tis true. Well, it is kindly meant, I warrant." (Though this is a rather grudging admission.)

They step inside, and there is the lady herself. Harry strides over to the Bar. "How fare you, madam? May I ask a walking-stick of you?"

Why, of course the Bar is happy to oblige! In the form of a nice, delicate little cane, gold-topped and intricately carved. Harry is not particularly amused.

"Something stouter, if you please."

Something like this short, fat little stick, really more like a rather long club?

Harry looks to Enjolras in exasperation: You describe it.

Enjolras is looking tolerantly bemused, in the way he often does when friends joke around: okay, if it makes you happy, but what's the appeal...?

"Like mine," he supplies, "or Joly's."

Bar takes him at his word. The short club-stick is replaced by something that's exactly like Enjolras's, down to the detail, except that the wood is several shades darker.

"My thanks," Harry says, more to Enjolras than to the Bar. Maybe the next thing he can learn in Milliways is a sense of humor, but-- not today, evidently.

He takes up the stick and feels the heft of it in his hand.

"Well, then. I shall follow thee."

Enjolras's is based significantly on tolerant patience.

So doubtless Harry's gonna grasp that one any day now.

Enjolras leads the way equably upstairs, and down the hall with its many doors. (They may pass by a room with a placard of Feuilly's making on the door, perhaps.) He stops at a particular room, and opens the door. It's unlocked.

Inside is a room with a wooden floor, and a few mirrors of very fine glass and no decoration, and a stack of dark blue mats of some futuristic plastic down at one end, and a closet with the door ajar. It looks like somebody took a standard Milliways room and converted it into a gym for aerobics or martial arts, with the bathroom turned into a storage closet, which may in fact be what happened. (Or maybe it's a Room of Requirement or something. Who knows?)

Harry steps in and looks impressed. Really, it's going to be a very long time before he stops being impressed by how clear mirrors are here, and these ones are so big!

(Because Harry, rather like a small terrier, doesn't ever totally grasp his own height in comparison to others, it's also the first time he really notices how much taller Enjolras is. Hm.)

"O, 'tis very nice. Have we need of aught but these?" He gestures with the walking stick.

(Enjolras, who's used to being taller than many people, hasn't fully noticed either. Oh, he's aware, but only as a vague background. Mostly what he notices instead is that Milliways is full of giants.)

He shakes his head, setting his stick aside to shrug off his coat. (After that will be the waistcoat, and the cravat. Of course he can fight in them, but there's no need to dirty and batter good outerwear when you don't have to.)

"There's padding -- for practice fights, sometimes. Canst see some in the closet there. But I doubt we'll want it for a first lesson."

Enjolras is very much playing this by ear, based on how Harry takes to it, so you never know. But he suspects the basics are going to be worthy of some practice. Longsword probably has some very significant technique differences.

Harry's down to his shirt as well, doublet and jerkin tossed carelessly into a corner.

Though he is composed almost entirely reckless impulsiveness-- named for it, after all-- Harry is able to muster discipline in at least one area of his life, and it is this. His eagerness may suggest he wants to dive right in to just whacking people with sticks, but in fact, he will take his time to be taught the unfamiliar forms, and listen attentively to the basics.

The basics first: the stances, the basic forms of a blow, and the parries to counter them.

The general form of the art will be apparent very quickly: light and rapid movement, crouches and jumps at need, quick switches from foot to foot or hand to hand, full use made of the ease with which a walking stick can be whipped about for feint or for a hard blow. (Enjolras, admittedly, is a slim and rapid-moving man, and his style tends that way in any case -- but it's not as if Harry has bullish size and strength either.)

Harry's general athleticism and balance and forearm strength should stand him in good stead, anyhow.

Anything that depends on lightness and quickness is different enough from the techniques Harry's used to, which are mostly designed to compensate for the fact that you're wearing your own weight in armor.

But he is strong and fast, and in marked contrast to his fumbling efforts to shape and understand politics or ethics or philosophy, this he starts to pick up with ease.

This is meant to be done in street clothes, and it borrows from both fencing and brawling in an era where neither of those were solely the province of sport. In later decades, this will become a gentlemanly sport, a process which had already begun in Enjolras's day, but that's not the version he's teaching; it's not the version he bothers with. There are no strict rules, not as Enjolras teaches it: this approved, that disallowed, this to be done with exacting and proper form.

Only what works, and what does not, for the serious business of putting down an opponent so that he stays down.

"It is not so unlike the ways I know," Harry notes when they pause. And indeed it's not, if only in the sense that he, too, is trained in methods that are meant for real combat, not for show or sport.

"Oh?"

Of course he knows a little from history, and more from seeing how Harry moves with a cane in his hand, but that's still very limited. He's genuinely curious.

And ready for the pause, too. This may not be new to him, but it's still been a long steady while of drills, and close attention to what Harry's doing.

Harry grins. "Why, the aim of all is too see thy opponent to the ground. To bring down a man in armor, why-- he will not easily rise again."

Enjolras doesn't grin back, quite. But he's visibly in a good mood, after such an active and sociable afternoon -- although his good moods are certainly quieter than Harry's.

"There are those who do this for sport only," he admits. "Same as boxing and fencing."

This was less true in his day than a few decades down the line, when more time and work had been put into developing the proper honorable and scientific way of conducting masculine sports. But all the same, some people come to a ring to learn to fight, and others for an athletic diversion.

"But it's never been my way."

For good or ill; he doesn't judge those who would rather never look at a man and see how he might efficiently be maimed or killed. But he knows himself, and his capabilities.

Edited 2015-08-20 05:12 (UTC)

"Do they yet joust, in-- in your time?" He somehow doubts it.

It's a blurrier line in general, in his time: all sports are supposedly a form of training for war. But certain things, like jousting, have slipped into being sport for their own sake.

"No."

Well. In the recent and monarchical past, riding at rings still existed as a considerably more genteel aristocratic game, and got a revival in the United States a little while after Enjolras's day. But he disdains the one and doesn't know about the other.

"Is it common, for thee?"

Jousting is... a thing with knights on horseback. Prouvaire doubtless knows all the details. Enjolras has a vague idea, and never found it relevant to learn more than that.

"Very oft a feast or festival may be marked with a joust. And a trial by combat, or a single fight-- that, too, may pass in the lists. But that is not so often."

He swings his stick up and holds it out in front of him, parallel to the ground, like a lance. "It is no less a test of horsemanship than strength."

Enjolras nods: yes, it would be.

(And thus the province of the very wealthy, the only ones with the leisure and funds for that kind of test of horsemanship -- but he knew that to begin with.)

"And part of war? Or only festivals and -- training?"

"It was once, but no longer." And that 'once' was well before Hotspur was born. "But 'tis a goodly sport, even so."

Fair enough!

No, really, it is. The sport may be practiced in ways thoroughly predicated upon an oppressively hierarchical society, but so is everything in Harry Percy's life; you can work to change your society, as best one person can, but you can't opt out of it. (And it's not as if there's much in Enjolras's day either that's truly egalitarian, either. He knows it.) Enjoying something that doesn't involve actively oppressing other people is totally fair.

He doesn't really have further commentary to make on jousting, but he's happy to listen if Harry wants to talk about it more.

Harry could probably go on about jousting for quite some time, but in this instance, decides to show some restraint.

"Wouldst go on?" he asks, nodding to Enjolras's walking stick.

Enjolras follows his look, and shrugs consideringly. His expression says nah, we don't have to before he follows it with words: "If thou wouldst, sure. We've probably done plenty for one lesson, though...?"

He really is perfectly willing to continue if Harry wants to tire himself out by flinging himself at new techniques until he falls over. But barring that, he doesn't feel any great need to carry on past what's a reasonable practice duration, and a reasonable amount for Harry to absorb at one go.

(Enjolras is not an especially practiced teacher. This lesson could have been more efficiently organized, the explanations occasionally clearer. But he's helped new or less skilled friends very often, and he's got an organized mind, and he was a young man rather than a child when he learned to fight with a cane. So he does have a decent idea of how to go about this.)

Harry's instinctive response is to insist that of course he can keep going, but-- he know, also, it's better to have a short lesson well learned than a long one half forgotten.

He nods. "Then let us end here."

Very well, then. Time to gather up his discarded layers of clothing.

"Any time thou'dst like another lesson, thou hast only to ask. I'd be glad to. And glad to learn from thee thine own techniques, if thou'dst teach."

Okay, he doesn't really expect to be needing skills of armor and longsword any time soon, or possibly ever. But, well -- it's something to do, and it never hurts to broaden one's skillset. And unlike the devastating weaponry of the future, the very fact that it's outdated and unlikely to be of immediate use is sort of appealing; it's something to learn to a pragmatic end, but that end is more keeping in good trim and also talking to Harry Percy about republican philosophy than learning how best to kill people of the future.

"Thou'rt quick to learn this -- I know thou knowst it, but it's so."

"I would be most glad to learn more of thee, and show thee whate'er thou wouldst," Harry says, kneeling to gather together his own bits and pieces.

"I was brought up to't," he says with a shrug. Not to singlestick itself, of course-- but he assumes Enjolras will know what he means.